You're Really Here?
by Aille
Summary: Remus finds an old friend whom he hasn't seen in years. (fixed 20/05/03)
1. It Couldn't Be

**TITLE**: Your Really Here  
**AUTHOR**: Teigra  
**E-MAIL**: teigra_kefira@yahoo.com  
**PAIRING**: Remus/Hermione  
**SERIES**: Yes  
**ARCHIVE**: Ask first.  
**CLASSIFICATION**: PG for now  
**SUMMARY**: Remus finds an old friend whom he hasn't seen in years.  
**DISCLAIMER**: I don't own them... She does *points to JKR* and I am making no money from this, I'm just enjoying sharing some of my own crazy ideas.  
**AUTHORS NOTE**: Remus would *NOT* leave me alone until I wrote this. This is only the first part... but this is just to please him, so I can get back to writing my other fics. I now have a lovely beta reader... Markus... who has kindly gone over this (and many of my older fics) and betaed them for me.  
  


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He had no idea why he was standing out side the door of room 15 at the Leaky Cauldron. It was just a spur of the moment decision. He had seen a woman going up the stairs, the scarf that had been wrapped around her head falling to her shoulders, and it was as if he knew her. Tom had said her name was Bethany, but he was sure he knew her. He hadn't seen her in almost 8 years, not since her last day at school, but he'd remember that head of hair anywhere. That bushy brown elegant hair that always seemed to be a halo around her beautiful face.  
  
He wished he had seen her face before going up there, now poised to knock on her door. He felt sort of silly now standing there, coming up on a whim, sure that it was the woman he remembered. Berating himself, he knew that it wasn't too late to turn around and go back downstairs. The others were waiting for him at their table. However, he just couldn't walk away. Something within him would not allow him to leave until he knew the truth.  
  
Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door and waited.  
  
A bit muffled though the door he heard, "Who is it?"  
  
Shit, what was he going to say, that he just wanted to say hello? That he thought he knew her? The voice sounded familiar, but that could have just been his imagination. He had wanted to hear her voice for so long now that he sometimes heard it when no one was around.  
  
"Um, I saw you coming up the stairs, and I thought..." clearing his throat, "that I knew you from some place. Names Remus."  
  
He took a slight step back as the doorknob turned, and the door opened a crack. Not enough for him to see more than an eye peeking out, and a few small delicate fingers curled around the frame.  
  
"Re.. Remus?" Her voice was small, tentative, and almost sounded broken.  
  
"Hermione? Is it you?" He took a step forward and placed a hand on the door, trying to open it a bit more.  
  
"Oh Remus..." She sounded like she was choking back a sob, and started to try and push the door shut. "You can't... go... please."  
  
"Mione? No... don't shut me out again. Please, let me in?" He pleaded. How long had he wanted to hear her say his name again? How long had he needed to see her?  
  
He was shocked it was all it took, but the pressure she was exerting on the door stopped, and she backed away, her small fingers leaving the frame. The little pressure he was putting on the door opened it about half way. He almost missed her face as she turned away, covering it with her hands.  
  
"You... you can't see me like this. Please."  
  
"Mione, what happened?" He stepped towards her, noting little things. She seemed much skinnier than she had been when he last seen her. Her hair that had gleamed in the sun by the lake seemed limp and dull. Her robes were hanging off of her and seemed quite old.  
  
Her voice was barely a whisper, but he heard her any way. "I left him."  
  
"Who?" His voice a low growl. Then checked his anger as he saw her shrink away.  
  
"Mione..." He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "What's wrong?" He tried to make his voice as soft as possible.  
  
"Remus..." She turned to him and buried her head into his chest, starting to cry as if her world was falling apart around her. He wrapped his arms around her.  
  
Stroking her back, he whispered, "It's alright Mione. I'm here for you. I'll always be here for you." Carefully he led her over to the bed and sat down, bringing her with him. She had lost weight since he had last seen her. He could feel her ribs though the robes and he could also feel something else, she was freezing cold.  
  
"Mione, can you look up at me?"  
  
She shook her head into his chest, still sobbing. He could feel his robes getting soaked though.  
  
Cradling her in his arms, he just let her sit there and cry herself out. He would get his answers when she finished. What could have happened to her? This was his Mione. Who was this person she left? How could he have let her get into this condition?  
  
His thoughts were going through the many ways that he would make this man, who ever he was, pay for letting her get this bad; when he realized that she had fallen asleep, still crying periodically in her sleep.  
  
Not moving, he whispered softly to her, "Mione, I will get to the bottom of this."  
  
"Hey Moony!" He heard from the hallway, and he saw Harry and Severus walking up the hall calling him. He hadn't closed the door when he came in.  
  
"You two..." He called out. "quiet, I'm in here."  
  
He saw the two of them stop in mid-step and turn to look in the room.  
  
"What are you doing in here Moony, and who's that?" Severus asked, his left eyebrow quirked up.  
  
Putting a finger to his mouth, to try and quiet the two. "An old friend." With his other hand he was slowly stroking her hair.  
  
"Who?" Harry asked, not getting the hint to shut up.  
  
"Tomorrow. You two continue to party. It's your anniversary, don't worry about me. You've got Ron and Neville down there waiting for you." He threw them a smile. "I'm going to stay here."  
  
"Alright Moony." Harry threw him a look of disbelief, one of his best friends missing out on the party of the century. "But I want to know why in the morning." Steering Severus out the door, and shutting it behind them.  
  
Looking down at the top of the sleeping woman's head, he whispered. "I've missed you Mione." 


	2. Memories of a Lost Love

**TITLE**: You're Really Here?  
**CHAPTER**: Chapter Two - Memories of a Lost Love  
**AUTHOR**: Teigra   
**E-MAIL**: teigra_kefira@yahoo.com  
**PAIRING**: Remus/Hermione  
**SERIES**: Yes  
**ARCHIVE**: My web-page, my yahoo group, and any place else that it is wanted, just ask first.  
**CLASSIFICATION**: PG-13  
**SUMMARY**: Remus finds an old friend whom he hasn't seen in years.  
**DISCLAIMER**: I don't own them... She does *points to JKR* and I am making no money from this, I'm just enjoying sharing some of my own crazy ideas.  
**AUTHORS NOTE**: Remus would *NOT* leave me alone until I wrote this. This is only the first part... but this is just to please him, so I can get back to writing my other fics.  
  
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*flashback*  
"I can't do this Remus, not any more." She was pacing around his sitting room, her robes flaring out around her feet. He knew she really shouldn't be doing this, she had only been out of the Hospital wing for a couple of hours and only because Poppy couldn't keep her in bed any longer. Yet there was nothing he could do to stop her when she was in this kind of mood.  
  
"Love," he tried speaking calmly, not wanting to upset her any further. "What can't you do any more?"  
  
"This, all of this. I can't take it any more. The fighting is over, we've won, I'm leaving." She stopped in front of the fireplace, her back facing him. Even though it was the middle of the summer, there was a fire in the grate, so her body was cast in shadows while surrounded by a bright orangey-red light. "And don't call me that, I don't deserve love from anyone."  
  
"Lo…" She spun around and glared at him. Oh yes, the war had changed them; in ways he couldn't even begin to imagine. "Hermione, why?" He refused to even think that she was serious. She had just spent the last seven years of her life (well, nine, if you included the extra time the time turner gave her) learning to become the powerful witch that she was. The last two years in what he hoped would be a relationship that would last forever; he sure couldn't give his heart to anyone else. And the last year in one of the most gruesome wars since the Crusades.  
  
"Why? Do you really want to know why?" When he nodded his answer, she started in on him.  
  
"Lets see, first reason, my parents are dead." Yes, they had died, two of the first hits on muggle born witches and wizards families. That had happened right after she returned to school this year.  
  
"Second, my dorm mates were murdered in their sleep and I almost was too, except I was here." Lavender and Pavarti, two good witches that would have been useful in this war. A fire charm had been cast in the room and then accelerated until the flames were out of control. The rest of the tower was evacuated, but there had been no way to save the two young women. Goddess knows we both tried, she still bears the scars on her arms, refusing to let them be healed.  
  
"Third, it was a fellow Gryffindor who did it!" She was trembling with anger. "A bloody forth year that I… *I* was tutoring in potions." Oh he remembered that, Severus (he had become Severus to him just this year, you couldn't fight a war together and not start to respect a person) and Jeffery Flitwick had sniffed out the culprit together through a combination of charms and potions. When the child had been found and asked why, she said it was because they let a Mudblood stay in the same dorm as them and that all Mudbloods should be removed from the world (the muggle born student who had been her dorm mate had transferred to Beauxbatons the summer before their second year). Hermione had blamed herself for not seeing it coming, but the kid had seemed so sweet. The girl was now currently in the Ministry's hands until her sixteenth birthday, on which she would be sent to Azkaban for murder.  
  
"Forth, who was then kidnapped by Death Eaters, tortured to an inch of their life and then tossed out on the street to die? Me, that's who!" Oh gods, that was something he could never forget. She had been walking across the grounds, her arms still in the bandages from the fire, when she was taken. He should have never agreed to let her walk out there alone, but she insisted that she needed to think, needed to sort through what had happened. So he let her go, saying he would join her in an hour. He didn't see her again for a month. It was Oliver Wood who found her in the early morning of April, spoiling Voldemorts plans he was sure. She was almost dead when she was found, an hour more and she wouldn't have made it. Oliver had decided to take a different route for his morning jog, instead of heading towards the school he went in the direction of the Shrieking Shack, where he found her laying across the front step, bloody, naked and barely breathing. No one has told her the extent of what happened, the extent of what couldn't be healed, it had been far too long since it happened to be healed by magic. Even muggle medicine couldn't help her now. Yet he was sure she knew.  
  
"Fifth, I have lived in fear for my life for far too long." We all have, he thought.  
  
"Sixth, if I go to a Muggle University, I could get in on the grades I have." She did still have the best grades in the school since Dumbledore. "I could do anything I wanted to out there." That she could, he knew she was brilliant, she had known about him after all, long before anyone else had.  
  
"Seventh, I want to forget I was ever in this ruddy war, I want to forget it ever happened." He really couldn't blame her for that, she had been a part of it almost from the moment she walked into this school. When she became friends with Harry, she became a target. Over the last seven years she has seen more and done more than any one should have to do in a lifetime. This last year being the worst.  
  
"And finally, I killed someone Remus, I'll never, NEVER be able to wash that stain off my soul. I don't care if it was my life or his, I don't care that I was fighting a war, *I* took a life. It may have helped win this war, but I can't live with myself knowing how I felt when I did it." He had seen the cold fury in her eyes when she saw Lucius Malfoy, just a week ago, during the final battle. It was then that he knew just who had done most of the horrid things to her during her kidnapping. They had both seen other Death Eaters, Goyle, Crabbe, McNair, even Diggory and she had been almost clam around them. Lucius however sparked something I had never seen before in her. True hatred. Lucius had been the last barrier between the Dark Lord and us, several wizards had already gone against him and now lay scattered around his feet. He had done something to protect himself from magic, but had forgotten to protect himself from physical attacks. He had laughed when he saw her, taunted her, underestimated her. Ever since she returned from what she referred to as 'the month from hell' she had been carrying a dagger strapped to her right calf. Severus, Sirius and Remus had all spent several days of the week, for the last three months teaching her how to use it and she proved just how much she had learned that day. She attacked Lucius so fast the man never knew what hit him. It was wizards fighting wizards, he had never expected an attack like this. There had been a sort of gleam in her eyes when she removed the blade from the mans chest, looking him in the eye making sure he knew exactly it was who killed him. Oh yes, the war had changed all of us. Her removal of Lucius had allowed Harry into face Voldemort and shortly there after, we had won the war.  
  
Their first day as full wizards and witches, the first day they had received their licenses, the graduating class of Hogwarts '97 had fought and won the final battle with Voldemort.  
  
She had collapsed after attacking Lucius, crumpling in on herself. A slow acting curse, which she must have been fighting for ages before succumbing to it. A parting gift from one of the captured or dead Death Eaters. It put her back in the hospital wing until today.  
  
"Hermione," He didn't want to ask this question, not now, he felt he already knew the answer. "What about us? You know I can't enter the muggle world."  
  
"I'm sorry Remus, I do love you… but I… I can't… No, won't stay here, in this world, any longer."  
  
"Then I won't stop you. I understand," and the sad thing was, he did. He did understand why she needed to leave.  
  
He never did stop her when she walked out his door, even though it broke his heart to do so. For the next couple of years he kept an eye on her, hoping beyond hope that she would return to him, but she never did. By the end of the third year he resigned himself that she would never come back. He knew he could never love another woman, knew that he would forever be alone, yet sometimes he dreamed…  
*end flashback*  
  
This wasn't how he wanted to get the woman of his dreams back. Padfoot had teased him for ages that he was holding onto a pipe dream, that she was gone, but he had never completely given up on her, she had said she loved him, it was one of the last things she ever said to him.  
  
The woman laying here in his arms was only a shadow of the person he once knew. He knew she had gotten into Cambridge University, yet had quit less than a year into her studies. After that he had a hard time tracking her, she was travelling all the time, not staying in one place for more than a few weeks at a time. By the time he had completely lost track of her five years ago, he knew she had to be coming to the end of the money her parents had left her. He hoped that it would bring her hope, but it didn't.  
  
Whispering softly, "What happened 'Mione? Who did this to you?" Resting his cheek on the top of her head, he gently kissed her hair.  
  
"I still love you." 


End file.
